The team found that thick words behave differently from purely descriptive words even when those words match in pleasantness or unpleasantness. Patterns held across moral, knowledge-related, and aesthetic terms, and across positive and negative examples. That suggests a shared quality in thick language that isn’t captured by valence alone, meaning these words may guide thought and social understanding through more than emotional coloring.
Why this matters for human potential: the labels we use influence learning, judgment, and inclusion. If certain words carry built-in evaluative force, they can shape expectations and group dynamics in classrooms, workplaces, and communities. Follow the full article to see how these linguistic patterns were measured and what they imply for clearer communication, fairer evaluation, and more inclusive language practices.
Abstract
Thick terms like “courageous,” “smart,” and “tasty” combine description and evaluation, contrasting with purely evaluative terms like “good” and “bad,” and descriptive terms like “Italian” and “green.” Thick terms intuitively constitute a special class of evaluative language; but we currently do not know whether the psycholinguistic effects of these terms are reducible to known semantic dimensions. Here, we start to systematically explore this question by comparing the behavior of thick terms and non-thick descriptive terms with similar affective valence, which is a strong candidate semantic dimension to account for differences between evaluative and non-evaluative language. We study thick terms from English, Dutch, and Italian, combining behavioral data from the cancellability task, Cloze task, and free association networks, with natural language processing methods and psycholinguistic ratings of word valence. We find that thick and non-thick descriptive terms are associated with different psycholinguistic effects, even when carefully matched for valence, suggesting that valence is insufficient to account for the difference between thick and non-thick terms. Instead, we find no reliable difference between positive and negative thick terms, and between moral, epistemic, and aesthetic thick terms. Our findings indicate that thick terms form a homogeneous class of evaluative language whose psycholingusitic effects cannot be explained only in terms of affective valence.
